Wednesday, August 12, 2015

This is a question and answer post on how to setup workflow for portrait and wedding photographers.

Photographers With Employees

I am a portrait and wedding photographer with employees. I want a system that will track clients all the way through the entire process from initial encounter to picking up their order. I also want to be able to assign employees to different steps along the way.

The best method in this situation is to use jobs.

Option 2 of the following tutorial provides instructions on how to do that.

I am a portrait and wedding photographer with employees. I want a system to track the leads that come in and the steps that I need to do to convert them from a lead to a paying customer. I do not want to track anything after the client is booked but I do want to assign employees to different steps and have a project deadline.

I am a portrait and wedding photographer without employees. I want a system to track the leads that come in and the steps that I need to do to convert them from a lead to a paying customer. I do not want to track anything after the client is booked.

The best method in this situation is to use client pipelines and associate them with the lead.

Option 1 of the following tutorial provides instructions on how to do that.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

In the latest update of StudioCloud numerous enhancements have been made to pipelines and jobs. Below is a summary of the improvements:

The new client, new prospective client, new leads, and new events windows all now have a job pipeline combobox. If a job pipeline is selected from those windows then a job will automatically be created when the client or event is created and they will automatically be associated with the job. The job will also have the job pipeline assigned to it.

This tutorial shows what the combobox looks like for the edit client and edit event windows.

If a job pipeline has the checkbox "Default Pipeline For New Jobs" then the job pipeline combobox in the feature above will be automatically selected when you click the new client, new prospective client, new lead, or new event window. Which means that jobs will automatically be created for new clients, prospective clients, leads, and events when the save button is clicked.

The pipeline stage windows have been updated to be easier to setup pipeline stage actions.

Pipeline stage actions now support removing an assigned employee from a job, project, or task instead of just assigning employees to them. This is useful if you want to assign an employee to a job at one pipeline stage and then remove the employee so that whichever employee is free can take the next pipeline stage.

Jobs have been updated to support job deadlines as well as pipeline stage deadlines. Job pipeline stages have been updated to support pipeline stage deadlines as well. This is useful in situations where a pipeline stage needs to be completed in a specific amount of time regardless of the job deadline.

Jobs have been updated to support employees being assigned to them.

Jobs have been updated to also support emailing or sms text messaging employees.